Welcome to the Political Science Department home page.
Political Science is the study of how humans live collectively--how individuals organize themselves into social structures and how they make decisions concerning their common destiny.
As students of politics, we seek to understand the structures and processes of government on the local and the national levels, as well as the relations among nations on the world stage. Our focus, however, is broader than the formal institutions of government. Many social entities outside of government, including political parties, interest groups, corporations, the media, or even other nations, also influence the allocation of values and goods within a society. Hence, civil and economic organizations are also within the purview of political science.
Finally, because politics is an inherently moral enterprise, one involving the pursuit of justice, we are concerned not only with how societies are governed, but also with how they ought to be governed.
We invite you to contact individual members of the Department with any questions you may have that are not answered here. E-mail addresses are included for this purpose. Some Department members maintain their own Web pages. You can access these by clicking on the instructor's name. Finally, we include our Political Hot Buttons section, containing links to resources useful for research on politics and political issues.